El contrato de Vodafone yu
2013 · 2m · España
Directed by Álex de la Iglesia
Genres: dark comedy, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
A man steals a contract from a bank of souls and is chased through Madrid's Gran Vía by an angry crowd dressed in black, until he is carried before a queen mother who refuses his soul's contract.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
De la Iglesia does what most directors are too timid to attempt—he steals a commercial gig and turns it into a two-minute fever dream where a soul-stealing bank chase spirals into absurdist theater, then flatly refuses catharsis at the end. It's a Vodafone ad that hates advertising, and that's exactly the kind of subversive nonsense that shouldn't work but does.
The film executes a precise tonal register—balancing surrealist vocabulary with commercial brevity—and the final audience-with-the-queen-mother functions as a formal inversion of the Faustian compact, positioning refusal as its own kind of closure. It's minor de la Iglesia, but the discipline of the short form sharpens what could have been mere flourish.
The decision to cut from frenetic Madrid street chaos to a hushed, deadpan throne room confrontation in under two minutes creates the entire film's meaning—a single editorial choice that transforms a chase into a moral standoff, and makes the queen's refusal land like doctrine rather than punchline.